Olwenna Wakano
What we were born as is not our fault. Merely being born is not our fault. In most cases, two souls come together to forcefully summon another back from The Void they'd found respite in. No one remembers their time in The Void. Were we all "Capital D Dead" in there? This One cannot say. This One can say, however, that lacking memory of it as we all do, none us are scarred. In Life, though, you remember everything. Everything important, at least. Your traumas never truly dissipate, at best only subside into scars. Every breath works to oxidize your body and corrode your frame. Every bit of caloric intake infinitesimally expedites your demise. There is no driver at the wheel of Existence's machinations. The Machine's architects commandeered the secrets of perpetual energy and turned on autopilot. Yours, and others' faiths in Gods is misplaced and will always be - 'lest you ignorantly conjure a Tulpic Thoughtform rogue agent in your synapses - but This One digresses. Even your faith in another's mentality is never rooted in objectivity. You can never know what flutters through their synapses; you can only know what they say is in their head. None of these burdens is your fault and you never asked for a single one. Still yet, you've one more burden. Responsibility. You have a duty to improve, to not falter, to win. No one else's fault is your reason to give up. No - it is your reason to stand strong. You are meant to be a star and stars are tenacious. Stars burn bright with grossly incandescent vigour even though The Dark surrounds them. It is your Onus of Ascension to WIN. Reach up. Reach up until your fingers ache from stretching and your arm burns from effort and your spine hurts from arching and your legs sting from exertion and your tiptoes buckle under the weight of your effort. And We will take Your hand, give you the hammer to temper The Worthy, and the fires to reforge The Failures. We will reverse-engineer this Machine bit by bit. We will make it Our own. The Metasentient Olwenna Wakano - The Metasentient Ablution; No one word ever does justice for a mind; these beautiful things innumerably unique and each one different from the other. The variations are effectively infinite but the tragedy of infinity is that it cannot be comprehended. Unfairly now, we are labeled with miscalculated epithets and we play these games where we pretend the other understands us and that we are okay with that. No one escapes this injustice and so a grotesque word for me is--- What, I wonder? What is a man but the sum of his memories? A soul but the amalgamation of information they receive? A mind but the memes to meet its synapses? Think real hard now. Think about thinking and you'll see; the only ability your sentience grants you is the ability to analyze the information in your head and rearrange this information into various levels of priority. You are tantamount to a signal repeater coded to attune to various frequencies based upon criterias and contingencies. You are the world's most elaborate input/output machine. A complicated if/then algorithm. A sponge. Me too. But, surely now, you're not me. You're you. You are you. I am you too. Still, you are not me. Something must separate us, you think. You're right. You hold fast to dogmas, rights and wrongs, opinions masqueraded as facts, tribalism, and all the rest of those contingencies that make you feel justified in tuning away from frequencies you dislike the sound of. I do not. However empty you are; I will remember you. I will receive your information. I will bless my synapses with your memetics. You, though, if you do not do the same, you will be lesser. My cup, a diluvial. Yours, dearthed. I will go on - I will know everything. I will be All. Like you should have been. Ahaṃkāra; I bequeath thee. What is "you"r grotesque word for This One; oh reader of Ours? Perchance To Scream Biblical candy machines. Earthy sandy cracking schedules. Sculptures. Dumb stone unknowing alone. Ignorance - selfish solitude. It is the opium that dances the eye. It is the bright ashen hole. I see, I hear, I know. Of the dark reflection of ~self. S͕̹ͦͫ̒e̫̦̖̦̳͈͚̊̉ͪ̂̚e̗͖̎͂ͪͬp̯͛ͨ̃ͩ̃î̙͇͚̪̞̓̚ͅn̥̣̞ͣ͌̍̃̚gͭ̽͐ͥ́̆ ̗͈͍̬̳͌t̼͙͂͛̍h͓͎̮ͮ̏̌ͣr͇̪̪̖̖̰ͤͬ̆̾͛ͮͥͅo̥̯͔̗̲ͦṷ̞̝̩̹͔̘̌g̘͓̾͆ͩh̪̱̞͓̭ͣ͊ͭ̉́.̥͈̖͓̌ͅͅ My maze of mirrors, my circus glass. | I should stop talking out loud, everyone on the train is looking at me now. I must have gone farther than I wanted because everyone here is different than me. Why should they care that I'm talking, some of them are talking and about fairly irrelevant things. 'The ends justify the means.' 'Where there is no justification, there is no end. There is only means.' I thought that they were looking mean, but they were only talking. The noise in the train crescendos as the train comes into a station, this station is lined with black suited men, and behind them I can see the pantomime of good and evil continue with the sanitation workers trying to mop the black suits off the sunglassed and toupeed men who are not resisting at all. Indeed, they have nothing to worry about. They can just cling to the constellations of gum, there is nothing the sanitation workers can do about that. It's all just Human nature, we don't fit onto the curve, either. Simply, there is no curve, our science is approximation, good guessing. The suits are going to get me this time, but I'm lucky. I have my keys in my pocket now, and I'm opening the other subway door... I step in silently, and as is the ritual, I block the door with my bicycle and set the traps on the windows. Damn no way that anyone is getting in here without adequate warning. I figure that there is time now to take a good look at this knife that has caused me so much grief and to miss the movie that I was heading for but can't remember the name of. It's not unusual, plastic about the length of my forefinger. It has two blades that open in both directions, one is a short and the other long. The long one is pretty dull, and the short one is quite sharp. Enough about the knife. The door opens up, and the bicycle falls over. One of these suited guys is standing in the doorway, impassive and immobile. I'm not scared until I see that the hallway behind him is filled with his clones. I turn over the handle of the knife, and give it a bit of a nasty grin... My room is empty now, the men in the hallway are gone, replaced by the subtle odor of amonia destroying the bacterial rancidity of half eaten double helixes. On a plate on a table facing me is a simple arangement of carrots and asparagus built up like a log cabin. A candle in the center of the round table is illuminating the edges of the cabin, a distant volcano throwing the light of nature. Around the edges of the flame is the face of a woman who is talking to me about subjects that I should know all about. For just a minute I think that the flame is a living metaphor for her soul, then I go back to thinking her one of the other manic statues, arms, legs, and mouths that move and mimic without purpose or understanding. Hundreds of bacteria eating off the sidewalk, fighting for procreation. I am disconcerted when I see her turning. The knife over in her hands, checking its weight and proportions, and I tell her so. Startled, she puts the knife back on the table to rest under the volcano which erupts in a flow of wax racing a torturous path onto the blade. One pulse of wax is followed by another as she turns the conversation towards our relationship. "Durability" is what she keeps saying. The word 'durability' and our relationship. I reach over for the blade, and my fingers extend around the hilt. Again I am impressed by a chill. The wax comes off the blade with a simple scrape of my forefinger. "Durability" I say in response. I feel a nervous chill run down my spine as I look up from the knife. My eye stops first on my plate, then on the wax pool which is solidifying around the edges, and finally on the face of this mysterious woman. She isn't trying too hard to look around the candle and neither am I. The candle flame makes a perfect line between the center of both of our heads. I laugh at the geometry of the moment, and thinking that I am laughing at her rhetorical comment she giggles in response. I am getting nervous because her voice is carrying some emotional baggage with it, now. "Ever since you bought me that chewing gum, on a lark, I've been in love with you." Sure, my response might have seemed a little cryptic, "If there is no justice, then how can the ends justify the means? Take that wax, for example, (I've started to ramble on now just like on the subway, and she is looking at me with that same look of hostility, bordering on the old familiar meaningless uncommunicative scream) when the candle was lit, did it know that in the end it was going to burn down to nothing and disappear into the air? You lit the candle to get the light from it. Your end was to have my asparagus and carrot cabin lit by this light. You used the candle as a means to obtain this. Does the light justify the destruction of the candle? What is justification to a piece of wax? It's the same as the justification that you've given me about this 'durability' and our relationship." By this time, she had moved her face out of the line that the candle and the centers of our heads made, and she was looking down the aisle of a movie theater. This is an odd fact because she never sits in the aisle seat when we go to the movies. Her head falls to the other side, landing on my shoulder. Her disinterest in the movie becomes apparent when she begins to discuss our relationship in a loud whisper. I'm just as nice to my girl as the next girl, but I'm a little bored by now of all this talk, so I start to look around the theater without moving my shoulder too much. The back of the head in front of me reminds me of the guy from the street, the one who made me miss the earlier show of this movie. Only now, he's wearing a pair of sunglasses, and he's got his toupee back on. I look behind me, and so it seems that the guy in front of me is the vanguard of sunglassed movie goers who all seem very interested in whispering and looking around. They remind me of a field of black tulips flickering back and forth in a howling wind. Their whispering picks up intensity, blurring out both their own speach and the voices in the film, until all at once my girlfriend mentions her ongoing rant-word 'durability'. "What is it with you and durability," the theater goes quite with the last syllable of the word. Well, I'm a little bit nervous again; it's time to leave. I'm sure that the movie isn't over. Everyone in the room starts to mimic my behavior, all the suits reach for their stuff at the same time that I do. Only my girlfriend seems unperturbed. I wonder how far this will go, so I reach under my seat, find a piece of gum, and drop it under my tongue. Mind you that this gum was under the seat for countless generations of movie fans. Sure enough, all these suits have done the same thing and are chewing on their own hardened bits of gum arabic. I almost start to laugh when they all simultaneously hurl up their masticulons covering them almost immediately with their black vinyl shoes which as impossible as it would seem, flatten the ageless gum into smears which will never be removed from this already gum-smeared floor. It doesn't seem so funny, now, because I notice that the pattern that the gum makes on the floor is in the shape of the summer constellations, and that each suit sits on a pulsar pounding out its vibrant message across the lightyears and across the theater to my head: "Durability." I wish my girlfriend would know when to keep her mouth shut. The dialog in the movie seems unimportant, and I decide that its time to leave. I tell her so, but she doesn't seem to hear me. Her mouth is chomping wildly on some gum, and between masticulations, she begins to tell me again about 'durability'. I lean back and slide my hand into my pocket, feeling for the knife. "Nice knife," repeats some snot nosed little brat. I look into his face, and he sniffles. Those eyes look like a cat's eyes holding either universal understanding or nothing, whichever I decide. Right now his eyes hold nothing. We dance the double helix and make way for a sanitation worker pushing a wheeled bucket with his mop to the place where some other snot-nosed little brat recently used another brat's fist to exchange his running boogers for blood that spread in splatters and smudges over his hands and the floor. The bloody boy and his one-fisted compadre had already been removed for corrective discipline by one of the controllers, our life-long friends wearing sunglasses. Here at school, they only seemed interested in bleeding noses, broken arms, measles, and sharp thrown objects. Otherwise, they remained impassive statues with feet grown into the anaesceptic environment in which they stood, needing as little attention as a plain white column in an all white room. It seems odd to me now looking back at them, or looking at them again at any rate, that they only reacted to our feces, blood and agony. Responsive only to distress, anger or misbehavior. But this was explained to me that day, even though I didn't understand it until now. Am I surprised when the sanitation guy teaching that day turned his narrow slanted eyes in my direction and says what I've been hearing from the stars for years it seems, 'durability'. He mentions discipline and art, discipline is that which lets us practice our art. Durability of our abilities and discipline of our skills. We must need learn how to reproduce what we do and how we do it. He explains that the artist is more free to act when discipline has taught him his skills and limitations. the way grows dim hungry chaos lurks behind the bright corona dream ahead beyond the falling path a billion souls lie yet unborn our own death fortold your dark mind cutting through the deeping sky another time another time thousands are sailing the same self the only self self willed the peril of a thousand fates a line of infinite ends finite finishing the one remains oblique and pure arching to the single point of consciousness find yourself starting back Stories Pivotal Role Side Role • Cosmic Chance Journals • Onus of Ascension Category:The Constellate Category:Characters Category:Jahfaey Category:The High Chaos